Written by Hilary Barnes
(Editor’s note: Sarcasm detected.)
Germany, with a current account surplus of about 4 % of GDP, is obviously far too weak to stimulate domestic demand without losing the confidence of the capital markets. Chancellor Merkel has said so.
She is by training a physicist, one of these rocket science types like all the big noises at Goldman, so it must be true.
A good dose of austerity is what Germany really needs right now – and thanks to the knock-on effect of austerity in the southern members of the euro zone, that’s what Germany is getting.
We Germans know what the best policy is. If we all contract together, we’ll get growth. Stands to reason. Just as Schäuble said the other day. So obvious that there’s no need to explain it. Anyone can see it’s right.
We didn’t set up the European Union so that Germany could be Europe’s import champion. If Germany sets aggregate demand to start growing smartly, all that will happen is that Germans start buying more stuff from places like Portugal.
What a waste of money. Let Germans buy good German stuff. If the Ports want to sell their stuff, let them make it better and cheaper, and then we do and we’ll think about it.
My mates Barosso and his side-kick Olli Rehn understand this perfectly. Tell the Club Med laggards to slash wages, slash public sector employment, and hike taxes (thanks to that ECB survey we now know that they are all much richer than us Germans) and everything’ll go swimmingly for them.
In the mean time let them buy our stuff, “Deutsche ingeniörkunst” like they say in the car ads you all see on the tele, so we can have a nice big surplus on our current balance of payments account. That way it doesn’t matter to us if we have a bit of a deficit on all that stuff we trade with the Chinese and so on – and even then the euro zone still has a current account surplus.
Mein Gott! The way these southerners complain about austerity. Makes you think that Alternativ für Deutschland folk have got a point.
